Three Apples Fell from Heaven, Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s 2001 novel set during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917 in Central Anatolia, begins with a dedication page made of two parts: the words “For Nane and Dede,” and the lyrics to an Armenian love song: “Նորից գարուն եկաւ, գարուն աննըման” [“New spring arrived, a spring unlike any other”].16 The diminutives “Nane and Dede” for “grandmother” and “grandfather” reveal Marcom’s intimate
connection with the maternal grandparents to whom she dedicates her book. The song lyrics on the dedication page highlight the connection, since the lyrics are plucked from a song that Marcom associates with her grandmother. As Marcom tells it, when she started Three Apples Fell from Heaven, “I’m 27: I think I am depressed,” but “a tune started running in my head, and this tune stayed with me for days, like the ghost of something, as if someone had erased a black charcoal drawing on paper but the faint outlines were still there” (Marcom, “Armenian Genocide Commemoration Speech”). The ghostly tune wouldn’t leave Marcom alone. The unrecognized sound kept hounding her. She didn’t know the lyrics to the song in her head, but the melody had taken up permanent residence in her mind. On a whim, she sang the unrelenting melody to her mother, who burst into tears. Marcom’s mother tearfully explained that the song
16
Throughout this chapter, I will provide rudimentary phonetic pronunciation guides for Armenian words in Western Armenian, the dialect I speak. Here’s how to pronounce “Նորից գարուն եկաւ, գարուն աննըման”: “Nor-eetz kah- roon yeh-gahv, kah-roon an-nuh-mahn.” The translations provided here and in the rest of the chapter are my own.
was a favorite of Marcom’s grandmother, Anaguil, who survived the Armenian genocide and died in Beirut when Marcom was 9. To Marcom, “when that song came back to me from the ether, it felt like a sign. As if my grandmother were trying to tell me something almost two decades after her death, that I must remember, that I must write it down and make a book of it. That I could do it. In any case, I made a promise to her then that I would try my best” (Marcom, “Armenian Genocide Commemoration Speech”). Marcom interpreted the recalled song about a lover who reappears every spring as a message from her grandmother, a call to write her grandmother’s experience of surviving the Armenian genocide in Central Anatolia at the beginning of the twentieth century by gathering her four younger siblings and escaping to Beirut. She heeded the call.
Yet the book that Marcom wrote to heed that call is a polyphonic tapestry wherein her grandmother’s story of survival is just one of the threads. Indeed, Marcom already signals her departure from a strict retelling of her family’s experience with the song lyrics that she reprints on her dedication page. The song lyrics are the first lines of the folk song, “Ճէյրանի Պէս” (“Like a Doe”), a song whose history itself combines old and new.17 According to Armenian ethnomusicologist Sylvia Alajaji, “Ճէյրանի Պէս” was an Armenian folk song “that at one point had been harmonized by the choir directors” of Lebanon who strove to preserve traditional Armenian culture in a new diasporic community
(Alajaji 210). This older folk song became an international Armenian hit in the 1970s when superstar Lebanese-Armenian singer Adiss Harmandian made it one of the “traditional Armenian folk songs that were updated and sung in a
thoroughly Westernized pop setting” (Alajaji 203).18
Further, as reprinted on Marcom’s dedication page, the first lines of “Ճէյրանի Պէս” highlight the song’s simultaneously old and new nature. Readers of Armenian would notice the idiosyncratic spelling of the word “աննըման” (“unlike”).19 Where contemporary Western Armenian speakers would write “աննման,” in Marcom’s dedication an extra “ը” appears between the two letters “ն”.20
With the added letter, the spelling takes on a decidedly nostalgic bent, since it is the way that the word is spelled in older songbooks.21 When Marcom uses the older spelling of the song,
18 Sylvia Alajaji’s 2009 dissertation, “Diasporic Communities and Negotiated Identities: Trauma, Recovery, and the Search for the Armenian Musical Voice,” on Armenian diasporic music, summarizes well the iconic function Adiss
Harmandian played in the Beirut Armenian community as part of the estradayin music movement (see, especially, pages 178-216).
19
“Աննման” is pronounced “ahn-nuh-mahn.”
20 The letter “ը” is called “uht,” and the letter “ն” is called “noo” in the dialect of Armenian that I speak, Western Armenian. For Eastern Armenian speakers, the letters are often called “uh” and “nuh.” See J.J.S. Weitenberg and John A.C. Greppin & Amalya A. Khachaturian for information about Armenian dialects. 21
While there is some controversy about whether or not epenthesis, or the addition of one or more sounds typically to the interior of a word, was an active process in Classical Armenian, I’m most interested in the orthographic and not phonological side of the debate. In the case of orthography, Avedis K. Sanjian insists that the “letter ը ǝ [pronounced “uh”] is rarely written, even though shwa is the most common vowel in spoken Armenian” (360). Further, Armenian linguist Amalia Khachaturian has posited that “In most instances, irrespective of its historical origin, ǝ has the function of a vowel prothesis in consonant clusters. In word building it is apt to phonetic shortening up to its full reduction. In these cases ǝ has the function of a syllabic vowel, and since it is not conveyed in
she brings an outdated orthography into her modern, English book.
Interestingly, the older orthography actually aids pronunciation in the present. The added letter more closely resembles how an Armenian speaker would pronounce the word (pausing between the two twinned letters), akin to writing out kibosh as “kiybosh” to help with saying the word out loud. For multiple reasons, the song is an apt representative for Marcom’s project in Three Apples Fell from Heaven: the song was a traditional one popularized by a pop singer in his cosmopolitan moment; the older spelling of part of its lyrics unexpectedly makes the pronunciation of the lyric easier; and, the song was the manifestation of Marcom’s grandmother’s haunting voice calling her to write about the past in her present. In all three cases, the past is redeployed in the present to achieve enriched and enriching effects. These aspects of the song reveal an investment in the past’s role in the present, an investment in passionately remembering the past in the present moment because it offers new emotional and intellectual insights. Essentially, the song and Marcom’s experience with it—its initially haunting arrival in the present, its unusual reprinting in the novel to more closely align with its pronunciation—encapsulates the phenomenon that
orthography, it is often called ‘a secret syllable’ (gałtnavank). Examples: tǝxur ‘sad’, kǝrknel or kǝrkǝnel ‘to repeat’, kǝṙunk ‘crane’, kǝtur ‘ceiling’, dǝproc ‘school’, xǝlurd ‘mole’, t‘ǝmbuk ‘drum’, kǝṙiv ‘war’, etc.” (Khachaturian 56, emphasis mine). For more information on the phonological and lexical debate, see
Frederick W. Schwink’s and Marc Pierce’s articles. In any case, “աննըման” is far less commonly used than “աննման” in current writing. After checking
numerous dictionaries, I couldn’t find a single entry of “աննըման” or “նըման.” In my research, the only examples of the spelling with the extra “ը” are in older songbooks.
theorists have called postmemory, including my emphasis on keeping the content of ancestral trauma alive.
I use the song’s enactment of postmemory as a model for explaining the way that Marcom’s polyphonic, fragmented, and formally difficult novel about the Armenian Genocide treats storytelling itself as the access to and realization of postmemorial effects, and does so in a manner that explores the potential of an imagination that operates by contrast. The novel is polyphonic in that each chapter is narrated from a different character’s point of view. In one chapter, a deceased baby named Dickran offers three possible scenarios for what happened to him in the Deir al-Zor desert to his unnamed listener. Another chapter is narrated by Rachel Eskijian, who never admits that she committed the crime of suicide, but who lists all the reasons why she did anyhow. Still others are narrated by a young scholar named Sargis who slowly goes mad in an attic hiding from the gendarmes, while another pair of chapters are told by the personified character of Rumor, who offers the long history of the Armenians in the Anatolian plains. A trio of chapters end with the Anatolian storytelling convention the novel is named after, “And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the eavesdropper.”22 Taken
22
Marcom names her novel after the terminal storytelling convention used by Anatolian—Turkish and Armenian—storytellers. Armenian storytelling has its equivalent of “once upon a time” with “կար ու չկար,” which is pronounced “gahr oo chuh-gahr” and roughly translates to “there was and there was not.” It also has its version of the terminal convention of “And they all lived happily ever after.” Armenian stories end with a variation of the formula that begins with “Երկինքէն երեք խնձոր ինկաւ” (translated as “Three apples fell from heaven” and pronounced “yer-geenk-en yeh-rek khun-tsor een-gahv”). Depending on
together, these multiple voices represent the telling of stories and their
deployment for transformative postmemorial ends that are existential, affective, and critical rather than commemorative and redemptive. In Three Apples Fell from Heaven, the mediating function of the imagination works by contrast: Contrasting iconic images and plots from an ancient Armenian past with their perversion in the genocidal moment, Marcom transforms the recollection of stories and fragments into a new ownership of their enduring emotional and defiant contents, which ultimately belong to the author herself when the reader—who takes the apple that falls to the eavesdropper—assumes his or her role as required, in the present moment, by the ancient storytelling convention.
In one sense, then, trauma is kept productively alive because the storytelling convention is kept alive in altered form: i.e. the convention now exists in reference to the specific demands for survival posed by the threatened extinction of the Armenian people, whereas earlier it served such traditional functions as celebrating heroism and affirming cultural identity. Nevertheless, “aliveness” by definition occurs in the present, and as the convention asserts, such a present culminates when all parties are present to one another in and through the experience of storytelling. Assuming the readerly role of
who is telling the story, the storyteller can choose to distribute the apples to whomever they like. Amongst its variations, archivist Anne M. Avakian found that the “standard distribution” is the one where the apples are given in the following pattern: “one for the teller, one for the listener, and one for the one who gives heed/ear” (Avakian 95). Some storytellers distribute the three apples amongst the characters in the story they’re telling. Others distribute the apples inequitably, with the listener receiving two apples. Still others give an apple to God. There are plenty of variations to choose from, but the beginning of the terminal formula always mentions three apples.
eavesdropper is therefore affectively to become a character in the story Marcom owns by virtue of her passionate remembering. In an interview with literary scholar Shushan Avagyan about the publication of her fourth novel, The Mirror In the Well, Marcom insists that “the books that I love, which I think of as
masterpieces, have, in a manner, taught me as I read them to read them—books like The Sound and the Fury, or The Street of Crocodiles, or The Rings of Saturn—so perhaps in that way books cultivate readers, and books also, by the way, ‘make’ writers into the writers that they are. My books in some ways have made me as much as I have them” (Marcom, Interview by Shushan Avagyan). Elsewhere, Marcom elaborates upon the affinity she has for books that teach readers how to interact with them in terms of a principle both aesthetic and performative: that “books do allow for a deep connection: the consciousness of a reader with the text and story of the book—and that is amazing and radical and very particular to the mode of reading” (Davis-Van Atta 136). Marcom, in my view, is not referring to the way in which a narrative trains responsive readers for moral, ethical, or empathetic purposes. Rather, she is interested in the connection established when an author’s way of writing becomes consonant with the reader’s way of reading, such that a shared consciousness—not ideational or emotional training per se—becomes the primordial experience of connection within which various postmemorial effects occur and as various kinds of “knowledge.”
In my chapter, I argue that the shared consciousness that Marcom forges between her writing and the reader’s reading occurs in three vignettes—
“Mardiros,” “The History of Bozmashen as Iterated by the Local Dogs,” and “As To Where Are the Bootmakers and the Town of Kharphert”—that end with the “three apples” convention. In each of these vignettes, Marcom takes herself and her eavesdropper through a sequence of maneuvers. First, each vignette
establishes an “archive” from different sources. I use “archive” here to include those collected source materials that unsatisfactorily describe some feature of the past the vignette eventually helps its eavesdropper passionately remember.23 Second, the contrastive imagination transforms each of these slender archives such that they keep the traumatic past meaningfully alive in the present. Third, the operation of the contrastive imagination, by positing salutary “truths”
immanent in the preserved feature of the trauma, produces postmemorial effects of ideational and affective import for the eavesdropper to live by. Though each vignette is created by making all three maneuvers, they complete each maneuver in a distinctive way. In “Mardiros,” the archive is epic narrative, and it is
transformed by an imaginative contrast between the ancient past and the genocidal present to obligate the eavesdropper to assume the role of rumor- mongerer in order to defeat a genocide bent on destroying stories. In this vignette, the formulaic narrative is rendered differently useful and adaptable, such that in its contemporary inspirational character it denies to the genocidal ambition—a strategy to exterminate a people by disabling their capacity to create
23 Holocaust writing might not call this assemblage of fragments an “archive” because the physical archive of the Holocaust is staggering in its size and scope, but in the case of the Armenian Genocide and transatlantic slavery, the
self-affirming stories—its own chosen mode of endgame action. In “The History of Bozmashen as Iterated by the Local Dogs,” the archive of a consular report and a folktale are transformed by ironic juxtaposition, the effect of which is to transform the despair of the eavesdropper’s principled and aesthetic
demoralization into an energizing, implacable anger that refuses “false” stories of genocide denial. In “As To Where Are the Bootmakers and the Town of Kharphert,” the archive is an allegory, but one that serves a perverse purpose, that delivers its victims to their own worst natures rather than warns them of such a danger. By creating surprising continuities—between past and present, between Turkish and Nazi genocides—the contrastive imagination converts the allegorical into a parable. This parable warns the eavesdropper of two dangers: fear of one’s own weakness, and the limitation of the historical understanding based on memory, the kind famously expressed by George Santayana. The parable instead extols postmemory’s commitment to keeping trauma alive as a way to recognize the historicity of the present, and for purposes both self- reflexive and self-reflective. As the allegory-turned-parable affirms, and as the commitment to passionate remembering presumes, the past and present are mutually constitutive and this is the challenge addressed through a historical imagination functioning within postmemory and as postmemorial narrative. Taken together, the significant effects and affects of the three vignettes emerge from and occur on the narrative terrain where postmemory’s ambitions to passionately remember are realized. For these reasons, I claim that Marcom’s is an exemplary postmemorial narrative.